I feel as stupid as a climate scientist

We all laugh at climate scientists for jumping to entirely the wrong conclusion and seeing conspiracies where there are none.

Well. For the last few days I’ve been noticing that emails have been disappearing from my inbox. It all started when I was clearing out my various email accounts which had grown to several hundred megs what with all the pictures (No! Archaeology sites & maps!). So I was busy selecting emails by subject, by sender, etc., and deleting them and suddenly I realised that my inbox was empty.

Well you can imagine my horror … I’d just been deleting everything I didn’t want. So that would presumably mean everything left was wanted. Strange how it was difficult to think of anything in particular I needed. Normally, I keep them in case I want to refer back.

But in a way it was also a great relief. A completely empty inbox. Now perhaps I could keep it tidy! And I seemed to be doing very well. For the next few days the number of emails that I was leaving in the inbox seemed to be remarkably low … then I read an email about some dog video from my mum, and then when I stopped reading it and went to check who else had got it … IT HAD GONE!!! Wooooh … spooky!

I’d noticed the same thing before. As I said, I have several accounts, so I often mistakenly sent from the wrong account and get it returned to that account. So, it was not impossible that I thought I was reading it on one, and my mum had mistakenly delivered it to the inbox for the “evilconspiracyofglobalsceptics.con” by mistake. But no! So, I have lost emails in the past because they were in the wrong inbox. But it was nowhere to be seen and it happened several times.

So, I checked my email spam filters … was there some bizarre filter that was deleting everything that came in … except the utter rubbish that I just hadn’t got around to deleting, let alone reading. How could my settings have been so dramatically changed. Was there some hidden hand from the internet … a warmist conspiracy to take over my PC … and delete dog videos from it?

This was too bizarre to be real. The filters were OK. The account settings were not set to “delete in 0 days” … which might have made them disappear almost as soon as I read them …. almost as soon as I read them …. everything in my inbox, was all the dross I didn’t want to read ….

So, I went to “view” … and selected “view all”, not “view unread”.

As I said, I feel as stupid as a climate scientists, seeing international conspiracies in my own stupid mistakes.

I think it’s a bit of “once you eliminate all but one … the one that is left, no matter how absurd … is true”.

Somehow, it had not occurred to me that I may have changed the view to only show unread emails. So, that wasn’t one of my “possibles” and as I got closer and closer to eliminating everything but the “hand from the internet”, I was worried that: a) I was being paranoid & b) it could be happening.

So, having a closed mind … like one that denies the possibility of solar … forces us to accept stupid ideas because that is all that remains.